


Dipolar Coupling

by fourfreedoms



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Angry Sex, Angst, Bottoming, Competition, Cuddling, First Time, Knotting, M/M, Size Kink, a/b/o dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 08:10:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3439865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/pseuds/fourfreedoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They weren't supposed to fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dipolar Coupling

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was a series of snippets that went by the name Alpha Squared on tumblr for a while. I was asked about it Friday and subsequently finally finished it off. So thanks obviously to lizzythechick for the prod. Thanks also to the usual suspects, joyfulseeker and demotu, for letting me moan at them. Towards the end there there was a lot of moaning. I am honestly still not sure how I feel about this. BUT, to quote svmadelyn, at least I didn't start something new.
> 
> EDITED: 2:52 PM PST 2/26/2015

When Kane was drafted to the Blackhawks in the summer, it gave him pause. The odds of two alphas on the same team were so low as to be completely unanticipated. And he _hadn’t._ It had been strange enough, meeting again in Sweden and feeling that presence, that magnetic opposite pushing at him on the ice. The last time he’d seen Kane, before he’d reached sexual maturation, he’d have pegged him for a beta for sure, because almost everybody in Jonathan’s experience _was_ a beta. Jonathan knew three other alphas in the entirety of Winnipeg and there hadn’t been a single one among the students when he went to college. 

It gave him pause, Kane going number one to the team that had chosen him, because how could it ever work? When he’d come into his heritage, the urge to challenge every time another alpha had crossed into the territory he thought of as his had risen up in him, as inexorable and inherent as breathing. He didn’t know how to be on a team without it being his—his people, his ice—and it was not in him to submit. But what could he do? Call the Blackhawks organization up and tell them to undraft that Patrick Kane kid? It goes against all tradition to disclose. Jonathan had never told them what he was. He didn’t know how to start now. 

So he’d grit his teeth, gone to camp, sick with nerves at the impending blow-up that they were genetically programmed towards, and hoped somehow they could find a way. He wondered, did Kane have the same fear? 

When he first shook hands with Kane, that very first day, the urge to force him to submit had brought a metallic taste to the back of his mouth. It had made the inside of his head jangle. He knew, meeting Patrick’s cool blue eyes, that he must feel the same. 

But this was everything Jonathan had ever worked for. There was no way out but through. They’d made it work. More than—that very first moment on the ice, Patrick deking around d-men and setting him up with a beautiful pass, he’d felt like the air had crisped up in the rink, a moment of perfect tranquility coming over him as the puck slid right to his tape. And every time they were called for drills, it had been the same. Fast-paced and coordinated, with good instincts for each other. Jonathan wasn’t a fool. He knew whatever it was they had was making other people look twice. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be going back to UND. 

At the end of it, Patrick had skated over to him at full speed, stopping short at the last moment, spraying ice all over Jonathan. 

“This is how it’s gonna be—” he’d started, holding Jonathan’s gaze too firmly to be misconstrued, a step away from trying to impose his will on Jonathan, and something about it had made him laugh. He’d pushed back, straightening up to his full height and squaring his shoulders. He was older and he was bigger, let Kane try to master him. They’d stayed like that until a coach had called out to them. 

“You did well today, boys,” he said, snapping them out of it. 

Jonathan demurred and Patrick issued a brash thank you. When he turned to look back at Jonathan he’d been thoughtful. They had been good. Jonathan couldn’t imagine a better winger. He saw from the look on Patrick’s face he was considering the same. Jonathan cleared his throat and Patrick nodded. An understanding passed between them. Whoever won this team, through skill and guts and determination, that’s whose ice it would be, that’s who would get to be alpha for the Blackhawks. The other would cede. 

Jonathan had left the ice that day certain that they would have their answer within a couple of games. 

Of course it hadn’t been that simple. They were too well-matched in skill and too different in play to be easily valued one over the other. And the fights that the uncertain power balance engendered were explosive. 

“Jesus christ, would you little shits fucking quit it?” Lang had said, losing his temper with them on the bench, in the middle of a spectacular loss on home ice, the reason they’d been arguing to begin with. The way they had both turned in unison, suddenly silent, and looked at him, had made him back off instantly. They were playing well, to the outside eye their line was a well-oiled machine, in near perfect synchronicity. It was inexplicable. It shouldn’t be possible. Especially during the times when Patrick emphatically did the opposite of what he wanted. With this disquieted adrenaline response running through him, he shouldn’t have been able to get along with anybody beyond the most docile beta. He knew it had to be the same for Patrick. Nobody ever tried to intervene again. 

And of course it didn’t stop there. The front office had stuck them together as road roommates. 

“We could say something,” Patrick had said, standing in the doorway of the hotel room, unwilling to cross the threshold Jonathan had already stepped over. 

“What would we say?” Jonathan replied. It was working. Improbably it was working. Did they want to mess with that? Get busted down to different lines? Betas understood them precious little already, how would it go when they didn’t understand themselves? At least they were struggling through this on even footing, albeit, that was the problem. 

Patrick shrugged and forced himself through the door, his presence pushing at Jonathan’s. 

It took Jonathan weeks to even get used to the taste of the air in the room. Even Patrick’s scent seemed aggressive, and sometimes, on edge, the temperature in the room felt ten degrees warmer than it was. But the answer did not settle. It didn’t settle when Jonathan scored his first goal on his first shift in the NHL. It didn’t settle when Patrick won the Calder. It didn’t settle when Jonathan was named Captain. 

“You could give in,” Jonathan had said, drunk off the tequila the boys had bought him, after a home-ice win against Phoenix. Their first win of the season. His first win as Captain. 

“Never,” Patrick had replied, grin as sharp and bright as a knife. 

And Jonathan had laughed. He’d gone home that night, and lying in his bed while the room sloshed back and forth in a not altogether unpleasant manner, and wondered what would it even feel like, for Patrick to submit? To not have space he took up in Jonathan’s brain, the buffeting of his will on the ice. The thought left him strangely bereft. 

Alphas got married young, their innate instincts driving them towards a mate, and there were plenty of hockey players in their age range steadily hurtling in that direction. He knew he should feel an urge for something to quiet the turmoil within him the way a mate could—but he didn’t. He felt nothing. And when it was at its worst, in the times where Jonathan thought he couldn’t live another moment, stretched to the limit by Patrick in his space, a space that should not be breached for so long a period of time, in disputed territory at that, he wished to god he could explain what was wrong with him. 

He dated, he knotted a series of achingly pretty blonde girls, waiting for the nothing to go away. He watched Patrick with his sweet gentle betas and wished he could say something, ask him how he should feel. But they didn’t talk about the reality of what they were. It made it too hard. And still they soldiered on, their rough edges grinding against each other, fighting to turn this team around, going places, over and over, until finally it was their turn. 

It turned out winning a Conn Smythe didn’t settle it either. 

Afterwards the whispers started up in the gossip blogs and message boards, speculation on what and who he was. About how he read so dominant on the ice, and the captaincy falling to his shoulders so young, gaining momentum as they entered their fifth season. People knew—other alphas knew, his parents knew, people he slept with knew. As far as he understood it, none of them were talking. It filled him with a base intrinsic and therefore unavoidable pride. At the same time it strained things between them, made Patrick tense and ten times as likely to lash out. Jonathan was having one of the best seasons of his career, but it was coming at the price of his peace and sanity. By the time he ended up with his ass firmly on injured reserve, he had begun to suspect Patrick was glad of it. He visited only once, when Jonathan was supposed to be resting, but it had set his hackles up so far, he’d nearly felt driven to physical violence. 

“You have to go,” he told Patrick, hands clenched tight at his sides. He was wounded. Having another alpha in his home when he was this defenseless went against every natural instinct that he had. 

Patrick looked like he was going to say something, fight back, because that’s what they did. 

Jonathan had growled, clinging to the limits of his control. “I’m not asking, Patrick.” He hurt. Every feral instinct inside him was screaming. He just needed time to be whole again and then they could get back to this vicious deadlock that had always existed between them. Desperation moved him towards dropping his head in obeisance and begging. It made him want to vomit. Some nameless emotion had gone across Patrick’s face. He threw down the package he’d brought and left without a word. 

It was filled with Patrick’s mother’s peanut butter blossoms, the ones the team jumped on whenever Patrick’s mother sent him a care package. He’d brought Jonathan food, a move of subservience. Jonathan leaned back against the wall and forced himself to keep breathing. 

When he returned, they clicked back together again, practices going almost like normal. In their first game, they played the way they always did, only to have it ripped out of their hands at the last second. But through it all, Patrick didn’t feel right. He was like broken glass raking through Jonathan’s consciousness, and when he got the ten-minute misconduct in the midst of that disaster of a game, Jonathan wasn’t even surprised. A part of him was relieved to have some space between them. He was surprised though when Patrick returned for the handshake and skated up to him, clearly miserable, but his presence no longer grating jagged edges in Jonathan’s mind. It was the familiar bold press he was used to. 

Jonathan felt a strange and unquantifiable _something_ traveling up his spine. It made his cheeks heat and he had to drop his head and look away. 

Back in Chicago, Patrick came to him, forcing himself in through Jonathan’s unlocked door. Jonathan had felt him much earlier, as soon as he’d stepped out of the elevator bank onto his floor, but he didn’t stop doing chin-ups in the doorway of his weight room. Not even through the jarring invasion across firm indisputable boundaries. When he stopped to lower himself down, arms shaking from the effort, sweating hard, and still feeling completely tangled up inside, Patrick was waiting for him, leaning against the wall in his hallway, like he belonged there. 

He straightened himself up and met Jonathan’s glance head on, eyes running over his shirtless chest and ratty nylon shorts with what could only be distaste. Jonathan was just about to ask ‘why are you here?’ when he lifted his chin and breathed out. “Just fucking do it then.” 

“Do what?” Jonathan shot back, equally hostile. 

“Make me surrender—” he cut himself off, but Jonathan knew what he was going to say. He couldn’t leave. And things couldn’t stay the same. 

“You’re not going to fight for it?” Jonathan replied, suddenly furious. “You’re going to martyr yourself? Fine then, you haven’t fucking earned it.”

He turned his head, getting ready to go back to his pull ups when Patrick moved, lightning quick, hand snapping up. Jonathan caught Patrick’s unexpected punch on his collar bone and stumbled into the wall. Patrick moved in close to throw another one, but Jonathan hooked him in the solar plexus, making him double over with a gasp, desperately drawing in air. Time seemed to slow, but not fast enough to make him reconsider. Jonathan tackled him to the ground and then they were rolling, punching whatever soft bits they could reach. Patrick caught him in the ribs and then again in the same spot on his collarbone, fingers savage on his skin. Jonathan barely felt it, adrenal medulla dumping out so much epinephrine he’d power through anything in that moment. He was burning, running 8-cylinders completely on instinct. It felt like being high. 

Flying blind, he pinned Patrick down and took Patrick’s mouth, kissing him hot and ferocious, because his body was telling him it was a logical move. Patrick arched beneath him, legs coming up to frame Jonathan’s hips. There was nowhere for him to go, and yet still he fought Jonathan, nipping at his lips with sharp teeth and grappling against the weight of Jonathan’s entire body. 

He tore his mouth away, forearms cording with veins as he fought to lift them off the floor, struggling for leverage under the iron-bands Jonathan had made of his hands. 

“Lemme…” he cut himself off to breathe as Jonathan shifted against him. “Lemme touch you!” he demanded, twisting his hips to get more contact. Jonathan’s grip slackened and Patrick knocked his hands aside and reached to grab Jonathan’s ass, fingers digging in without gentleness as he tugged Jonathan more firmly into him. 

The harsh touch sent more sparks through his blood and he captured Patrick’s mouth in another kiss. It sang through him, the sudden sharpness in the air, the oneness he occasionally felt so strongly on the ice with Patrick, and the mercilessness of Patrick’s touch. This was fucking in its purest form. What he’d done before had not been this. They fought through kisses and careless touches, grinding against each other on his hallway floor like horny teenagers. Patrick flipped him them over and stopped, arrested. 

“Jonny,” he whispered. His face flushed across the bridge of his nose and his eyes were wild. His lips were as red and swollen as Jonathan had ever seen them. Jonathan tugged him down with a hand at the back of his neck, guiding Patrick to thrust against him with his other arm. The nylon of his shorts slip-sliding over and over against his dick, against the building knot, was gonna be too much soon. He raised a knee between Patrick’s legs, thigh against his hot erection. The zipper of Patrick’s fly bit into the sensitive flesh where Jonathan’s shorts were rucked up. Jonathan didn’t stop him. He arched into him, imagined getting closer. Imagined stuffing him full of his knot, because that’s what his was brain was shouting over and over: mate. He came like that, on a hiccuping gasp, between one kiss and the next, his fingers biting into Patrick’s hips to hold him close. Patrick’s blue blue eyes were opened wide, startled almost, and lips parted on a low moan, followed Jonathan over the edge. 

But whatever that was, it couldn’t be. They were both alpha, and horrified reality soon set in. Patrick rolled off of him with a thud, wincing as his jeans chafed against his sensitive bits. 

“What have we done?” He scrambled away, putting space between them. “What have we done?” he repeated, voice filled with anguish. 

Jonathan didn’t know. It had felt...right. It had felt like the way they truly fit, playing on a line with all their cards on the table, making a goal happen with only 15 seconds left. Patrick made a disgusted noise and dragged himself to his feet. He limped out of Jonathan’s apartment without a backwards glance, door slamming shut behind him. 

And Jonathan lay there on the floor, still sprawled out, the aches and pains of that desperate coupling creeping up on him in a million tiny places. He turned his cheek against the wood, choking on wretchedness, and only then did the tears come. Hot ones, pricking at the corners of his eyes and flowing over. But what could they have done to avoid this?

*

Patrick left Jonathan’s apartment at a run and when he got outside he just kept on going. He ran from Chicago, he ran from the broken fucked up thing he couldn’t make heads nor tails off, he ran from everyone. And that’s how he wound up a drunken wreck, passed out in a bar, with friends who didn’t know what to do with him. It was his buddy Mikey who finally persuaded him that something had to give, while he was slumped over the toilet in his hotel room, puking his guts free of a weeks’ worth of excess, and weakly refreshing the headlines on Deadspin on his phone, trying to remember what happened. There were a thousand calls and a million texts—from teammates, from his parents, from his agent—everybody who might ever have worried about him.

“Man, you’ve never known your limits,” Mikey said, tired, sitting in the bathroom doorway, “but I ain’t never seen you like this.”

Patrick grunted, head propped on the lip of the toilet bowl, stomach still roiling. “Was she an alpha?” he asked.

“Who?” Mikey replied, rubbing at his face. He’d given up on Patrick the night before, told him to go fuck himself and left him behind at a frat kegger, but he was also the first one to check if Patrick had made it back alive.

“The girl I choked,” Patrick says.

“Jesus christ, you don’t remember?” Mikey answered with a horrified dark laugh. “You got into a tangle with her over something, I don’t even know what. And then, five minutes later, you go and fuck her beta friend’s girl. At her fucking party. So of course she defended her own.”

The thought of it sickened him. He remembered the girl, though he didn’t remember her beta boyfriend. She’d had curly hair, a soft mouth and legs that went on for miles. Beautiful. And yet the thought of putting his knot in someone else felt like…like a betrayal. He heaved again, throat raw, barely anything coming up. The nausea didn’t abate.

He waited for days after that for the news to break, the truth of what happened, Patrick Kane, hockey star, caught in an alpha battle for ground. But the news didn’t break. He went home. He tried not to think about the miserable hole in his gut and the way that his mother and his father and his sisters, and the front office, and everybody alive being mad at him was better than the look on Jonny’s face as he left him there on the floor.

He’d known for a while now just the way he was fucked up. The way he wanted Jonny as no alpha should ever want another alpha. A part of him hated the straightforward, simple calm that came over him, going over the boards with Jonny just behind him, the small bitter part of him that wondered why the fuck it ever had to happen to him. But mostly, he longed for it. He wanted to go back to Chicago and get his scent all up in Jonny’s place. He wanted to fuck him until he couldn’t breathe. But it couldn’t ever be. And there was nothing worse than getting to know what Jonny’s weight draped over him felt like, the taste of his mouth giving way to Patrick’s own taste.

There would always be hockey. Even if his brain wasn’t wired together right.

But then the lockout happened. And there was nothing to distract from their reality. Patrick went back to Chicago, and he tried to be around Jonny and be normal. Tried not to think about the way Jonny defended him to the media—not like, not like his master, but like an equal, and the way it had lit him up inside.

But he was so fucked up and he couldn’t stop wanting him in that sick way. So he left and prayed that the yawning gap of the ocean between them would prove enough.

There were more alphas in Europe. They’d preserved their bloodlines better here, wolf kin families sticking with other wolf kin families. They knew what he was. There was no hiding it. And that was how Segs’ learned.

“I always thought Toews was…” he said one night, lying on the floor in the mess of his apartment, drinking bottle after bottle of Heineken—the only beer he’d readily recognized when they’d gone out to the store. He was smoking up, some good shit too, but Patrick had to go back to his apartment with his mother after this and he wasn’t going to do it, blazed out of his mind.

Patrick laughed harshly. He shouldn’t give away Jonny’s secret, but who was Segs going to tell? “He is,” he answered.

“What?” Segs had replied, sitting up straight.

Patrick shrugged. “He is,” he repeated. He’d never told anyone about this. Not his parents. Not his sisters. It had always been his burden to bear.

“No fucking way,” Segs said shaking his head. “But you're…”

Patrick shrugged again.

“But how do you deal with that? You’re lineys for crissakes!” Segs demanded, clearly baffled.

Patrick sucked in a breath. “It’s never been a problem.”

And it was true in an extremely sideways sort of a way. It wasn’t healthy or natural, at least according to everything Patrick had ever learned. But they’d taken a shit situation and made something good out of it. It couldn’t be helped that Patrick was twisted up inside and didn’t want the things an alpha should want from another alpha—abject submission and respect for claimed ground. Some people were more alpha than others. For the longest time, he’d thought that’s what they would eventually figure out. Once the air was clear, it would be as it should. Eventually one of them would move on to a different team and establish their own ground. Instead he’d gone and fallen in love.

“Whoa, dude,” Segs said then, “what’s that even like?”

Patrick couldn’t answer. “You don’t have will. I don’t know how to explain it.”

Segs gaped at him. “What the fuck, man, who says that kind of shit?”

Patrick turned to him and looked him straight in the eye. After a long, fraught moment Segs dropped his head and blew out a breath, subdued.

“I’m not talking shit,” Patrick replied. “It just is what it is.” He thought about it for a moment. “If I tried that with Jonny, it would be like slamming up against a wall. Even being around him like normal is like…having a strong wind blowing against you all the time.”

The only stillness Patrick could remember was in the midst of Jonny's concussion, when he hadn’t even been able to reach for his will, he was so messed up. When Patrick had felt compelled to provide for him, as a good beta should. Jonny had weakened and Patrick’s testosterone levels had dropped at the same time. An inelegant and inexplicable symbiosis. That should’ve been his moment to go for the throat. It hadn’t even occurred to him.

Segs couldn’t wrap his head around it, so they didn’t speak of it again. But Patrick felt better that at least somebody knew, that somebody was aware of the weirdness between him and Jonny and hadn’t told him they were doing anything wrong. Segs didn’t know shit about wolf kin, but if he saw the utility in their play, well that at least made a third person.

He started dreaming after that. Bizarre dreams of Jonny, of lying in bed together in one of the hotel beds on a road trip, feeling so intensely that it was _their_ bed on _their_ ground. He’d dreamed of Jonny before, of making Jonny take his knot or shoving his dick past Jonny’s lips and then coming on his face, even one disturbing time of being laid out flat on the bed and letting Jonny slowly push inside him. But this dream was different. It was peaceful and in it, Patrick had felt with that same brain quietness he always had when he and Jonny were making plays together on the same line. He’d barely been able to haul himself out from under the covers that morning, he hadn’t wanted to let that feeling go.

Eventually, the lockout ended and despite the long radio silence between them, Jonny let him know. He didn’t say ‘come home’ in his text, because that would be too close to an order, but Patrick felt the drag behind it. It felt good, reassuring, and he couldn’t even surprised by that anymore. 

*

Jonathan had thought with the distance things would recalibrate—of course everything got all messed up and confused between them. He didn’t know of any other alphas who’d attempted something like this. But surely now that they had some space things would resolve. He believed that for exactly as long as it took for Patrick to arrive at the informal practices they’d been having while they were waiting for the lockout to end. It wasn’t like it used to be, the intrusion into his turf that made him feel like a rubberband, flexing to give way to another immutable force. He still felt it when Patrick stepped through the doorway, but the electric feeling that went through him was entirely different. Instead there was a crackling awareness that made him want to get as close to Patrick as possible, to lay his hands on him. 

“Jonny, you alright?” Seabs asked, skating to a stop beside him. 

Jonathan shook himself, trying to snap out of his distracted fugue. “Yeah, yeah, sorry.” 

Patrick skated out onto the ice, stitches train-tracked across his upper lip. What, Jonathan wondered, was Patrick feeling, if this was how Jonathan felt? Patrick grinned and tossed him a jaunty wave—at complete odds with Jonathan who was sure he looked as bowled over as he felt. So, perhaps this was just him then. 

Split onto two lines made certain things easier. They didn’t fight anymore—or not, at least, with the percussive dischord of before. He supposed it helped that they were winning so consistently. It grew easier and easier to ignore these anomalous feelings that caused him to suffer an unalloyed dissonance with his own being as he threw himself deeper into the game. Sometimes, he thought, maybe he should give in and finally tell somebody. But they’d split them up. He knew it with every ounce of intuition he had: he or Patrick would be bounced off this team so fast they’d barely be able to blink. And maybe that was the right thing—because the world he lived in now was one where Patrick’s smile caused him physical pain, where the heavy scent of his sweat in the locker room cut through everything else and made Jonathan go hard enough to pound nails. 

So that then was the real insanity, because this was awful, and Jonathan wouldn’t give it up for anything. But he’d found a shallow equilibrium, getting through each practice and game with Patrick out there with him. By the time they made it the playoffs, he was fraying. His shooting percentage had plummeted through the floor. By the start of the Detroit series he could barely keep it together, and the entire team was on edge. Zetterberg had been riding him so hard—it was starting to feel like the entire ‘Wings roster was headhunting him. And by the start of Game 4, he was at a saturation point. His instinctual response to threats shifted an imperative hormonal cascade into overdrive and he was lucky he didn’t do anybody serious damage. He wondered then, if Babcock knew, or if he was making a bet on those rumors being true and told them to rattle his cage. The thing was, he’d had it under control; if it weren’t for what had happened over the summer, if he and Patrick hadn’t gotten so twisted up in each other, he would’ve been able to take it. But now he was acting like an alpha who'd been separated from his mate. And that, Babcock couldn’t know. 

Seabs skated over to the box to calm him down on his third penalty on his third goddamn consecutive shift. Jonathan could barely hear him over the throb of his own heartbeat in his ears. Breathe, he told himself. Just breathe. He looked out across the ice over at the bench and found Patrick staring back at him, face expressionless. Jonathan dropped his eyes. He was losing himself. He curled his fist tight around his stick, heartsore and so goddamn tired, and asked the universe just what he was expected to do next. 

He needed to find someone. Someone else. The thought shouldn’t hurt so much. 

Hours later, after the wreckage of the game was thoroughly behind them, there came knock on his door just moments after he’d closed it. Jonathan considered not opening it. He wanted to be alone. Whoever it was, he didn’t have the energy to face them. Thirty seconds passed without him making any move toward it. Enough to send a message. 

A palm slammed against his door. “Don’t be stupid, asshole,” Patrick called through it. There was will behind it. Not much, not enough to be considered a real compulsion, but the threat of it was there. It felt like old times. Jonathan let out a long sigh and shook his head, smiling almost helplessly. 

He opened the door and Patrick burst through it, letting it slam behind him. 

“Patrick—” Jonny started, but Patrick was already hauling him down to kiss him, that same furious meeting of mouths he remembered from nearly a year ago, but somehow, even as he thrust Jonathan back against his wall and pushed a thigh in between his legs, it eased to a slow erotic slide of Patrick’s tongue against his, his fingertips stroking Jonathan’s jaw. 

“Jonny, I’m sorry,” he whispered when he pulled back, only barely lessening up on the hard press of his body against Jonathan’s. “I’m sorry, I know it’s not right, but I was going crazy out there watching him come at you—” he cut himself off like he’d said too much. Jonathan stared down at him with wide eyes and Patrick made a sound in the back of his throat and drew him down into another soft, wet kiss he didn’t know what to do with. It wasn’t like the last time, strung out, half-crazy with unexplained need. The expected turbulence between them gave way to something gentler. 

Jonathan drank him in—the taste and scent of him, the solidity of his shoulders tapering down to slim hips underneath his palms, and even the friction of that ever-present pushback of will. He was warm all over, gasping with it, lazily rocking their hips together. Jonathan was exhausted, burnt out from wanting this impossible thing for so long, he could barely stay upright any longer. 

“On the bed,” he said as he pulled away, putting steel into his voice. 

Patrick laughed as his hips jerked. The sound was almost desolate, and his hand clenched tight at Jonathan’s hip. “Ah, fuck, that gets me hot,” he whispered, head bowed forward. 

“It always gets me hard when you fight me,” Jonathan replied, nose brushing across his temple. 

Patrick remained where he was, boxing Jonathan in against the wall, holding his gaze the entire time. He pressed his thigh harder against Jonathan’s dick, making Jonathan draw his breath in to keep from letting out a truly embarrassing moan of encouragement. Until, finally, he stepped away. 

Jonathan unknotted his tie, watching Patrick’s shoulders move underneath his sports coat as he stalked towards Jonathan’s bed. 

“You gonna let me see you naked this time?” Patrick asked, looking over his shoulder. 

Jonathan paused. “If you want that…” he trailed off. If he did that, the bulge of his knot visible at the base of his cock, there would be no pretending about this. Patrick’s cheeks pinked up, but his face was resolved, eyes almost hard, like he was daring Jonathan to do something. 

Jonathan snorted and shoved him back on the bed, coming down across his lap to straddle it as he stripped himself of his shirt and tie, curling his spine down to kiss Patrick as he worked at his fly. Patrick stopped him with a hand on his chest, dropping his eyes to the obscene bulge of Jonathan’s erection in his pants. He swiped his tongue over his lower lip and hooked his fingers in Jonathan’s waistband, helping to shimmy the trousers down a ways. 

He dragged his eyes back up Jonathan’s body to meet his gaze. “You want me to take it out?” Jonathan asked, voice hoarse. 

Patrick lifted his chin and Jonathan blew out a breath, pushing his briefs down and taking his swollen, aching cock into his hand. He drew his thumb over the shining head and then drew his fist slowly down until he reached the fleshy protrusion of his knot and squeezed. Patrick shivered underneath him, teeth sunk into his lip. 

“You like that?” Jonny asked, honestly wondering. He braced his free palm on Patrick’s shoulder and rocked backwards right over Patrick’s own dick, hot and hard against his ass. Patrick exhaled sharply through his nose, hands coming up to grip at Jonny’s thighs. 

“I like—fuck—every part of you,” Patrick said as Jonny kept up the steady roll of his hips as he lazily jerked himself. 

“God, Patrick.” Jonny ducked down again, catching him up in another kiss. Patrick arched up into him, fingers biting into Jonathan’s quads as he rolled them over, the crisp cotton of his shirt rasping over Jonathan’s bare skin. They shucked themselves out of the last of their clothes, surging against each other, allowing that simple contact, bare skin to hard cock, to be enough. 

When Patrick’s dick slid up against his, caught between their bellies, his knot pressed to Jonathan’s, it ignited something in him. Fevered incandescent arousal ran through him, speeding up his breaths, making him groan. Patrick was making these noises, every time he broke off kissing Jonathan, these hot little whimpers, like he couldn’t get enough. A vision of spreading his thighs or rolling over for Patrick swam before his eyes and he came like that, half from the sheer thought of it. And just like last time, Patrick didn’t last much longer. 

Afterwards, lying together in the tangle of sheets, almost as if he could read Jonathan’s mind, he asked, “Would you take my knot?” 

Jonathan looked up at him, fighting the ingrained fretful alarm in his head that still said to him ‘no, never.’ The answer was yes. Of fucking course it was. “Is that what you think about? Fucking me on it? Stuffing my ass full of it? Making me come like that?” he asked, allowing himself to be crude in a way he usually wouldn’t. 

Patrick chuckled bitterly, hunching inward. “Sometimes, Jonny, I imagine taking yours.” 

Jonny belted an arm around his waist and tugged until Patrick was so close he could feel his breath upon his face. His eyes were squeezed shut tight, almost as if he was afraid to look at him. 

“Hey,” Jonathan whispered, brushing their noses together. “Yes, I would.” 

Patrick opened his eyes, he reached forward to skim his hand down Jonathan’s shoulder, watching his fingertips traverse over Jonathan’s skin. He dropped his hand. “This team, the ice we play upon—all of that is yours,” his voice cracked as he said it. 

And then, for the first time, after many many years of trying to think around and through and over the problem, it occurred to Jonathan then why, even though all of that was true, Patrick could never have ceded him that ground. “You’re right,” Jonathan said, watching the way Patrick shut his eyes again, this time almost as if in pain. Jonathan ached almost in unison. “But…”

“But?” Patrick asked, eyes slowly blinking back open. 

“I belong to you,” Jonathan told him. 

Patrick let out a ragged noise and drew Jonathan in even closer. “Does that mean you’ll do as I say?” he asked, pressing their foreheads together. There was the beginning of a smile at the corner of his mouth. 

“Not a chance,” Jonathan replied. “You gonna listen to me?” 

“Hell will freeze over, first,” Patrick replied. 

*

When Patrick woke up the next morning after Jonny told him so firmly, like there wasn’t even a question in his mind, that he would take Patrick’s knot, it was so close to those aching dreams he used to have of sleeping in the same bed that for a moment he questioned whether he was actually awake. But his eyes hurt from the glare of the sun peeking through the curtains, and the insistent pressure in his bladder had also never featured, so he was pretty sure he could assume Jonny quietly snoring next to him, covers half-kicked off was real. The harsh morning light limned the strong muscles in his back in gold. 

Patrick’s breath caught in his throat and his chest hurt just to look at him. He couldn’t stop himself from rolling forward, blanketing Jonny with his body, his warm skin velvety against Patrick’s chest. Tucking his face into Jonny’s shoulder, Patrick thought he could lay like this forever. He swept a reverent hand down Jonny’s arm from shoulder to palm. He was allowed to touch him now and he was starving for it. Jonny murmured sleepily and laced their fingers together. In this moment he could forget that they were in the middle of playoff series they were two steps away from losing. 

Back in Chicago, at morning skate before the game, Jonny was so thoroughly mellow he was baffling everybody. It sent shockwaves through the team, revitalizing them, and that night they turned the tables on the Redwings. Neither Patrick nor Jonny had capitulated a single inch, and yet the very air between them felt different. 

“You look fuckin’ high, you know that?” Shawsy asked him, sitting on the bench after Jonny’s scored his first goal of the playoffs. 

Patrick couldn’t help a smirk, tilting his head back. “Whatever, man.” 

“Shit, you’re weird tonight.” 

For the first time his hidden stature was doing him a favor, because if they knew what he was, they would immediately know exactly what was happening to him. It was strange and supposedly physiologically impossible for him to feel this way about Jonny. He’d think he was in it all by himself, alone in this unnaturalness, if he wasn’t with Jonny once they got off the ice. He lived his day by degrees—careful not to think too hard about the future or what lay ahead of them. If they weren’t balls deep in the playoffs he probably would’ve been freaking out, but he was too tired, too busy, and too drunk on hormones to summon more than a cursory thought about what his family would think. What the guys on the team would think. 

“They don’t have to know if you don’t want to tell them,” Jonny said softly, lying next to him in bed. 

“I’m just not—” Patrick started and then stopped uncertain. For the longest time he thought giving into this meant giving up a part of himself. That the only way to be with Jonny would be to subordinate himself to him. What scared him is that given enough of that hell they went through, he probably would’ve done it eventually. He’d tried that night in Jonny’s hall. Lord, had he tried. Everything had been so muddled in that horrible tug-of-war. He’d only known it couldn’t continue, they wouldn’t survive it, and he’d give Jonny his deference if it meant they could stay in the same place. 

But then it turned out Jonny was off-balance in the exact way he was and that same deference had weighed on Patrick like a stone. To cede to a friend, however mixed up Patrick was about him, was completely different than granting a mate his subservience. And yet, eventually, if that was what it took, Patrick would have done it. Jonny had never asked, would never ask, but still, Patrick knew that about himself now. 

“They don’t know what either of us are,” Jonny pointed out. 

Patrick laughed. “For me, maybe, they don’t know, for you? They know.” 

They spent a lot of time lazing in Patrick’s bed when they were back in Chicago, but had to be careful to ration their time together when they were on the road. When they were together, they required too much tactile reassurance, there would be no hiding it. So they avoided each other. 

And it hurt. 

“I don’t want to leave you,” Jonny said roughly against his neck, lips skimming the vertebra in Patrick’s bent neck as he held him close. This was unplanned. And dangerous—out in the open in their LA hotel where the vending and ice machines hummed away. Jonny had been out catching a meal with Duncs and Sharpy. The rooms the team had booked were on the fourteenth floor and on the way back, Jonny had decided to run up the stairs. Patrick had felt him as soon as he’d hit the eleventh floor and when Jonny passed the ice room Patrick was already there feeding quarters into a vending machine for a Smart Water he didn’t need. 

Patrick leaned his head back on Jonny’s shoulder, closing his eyes and concentrating on the steady thump of his heart against Patrick’s back. For a moment he felt bad for other alphas, mated to betas who would never have these impulses in return. At least here, this touch-hungry inability to let go was a shared burden. Drowning as deep in each other as they were, they would never be alone. 

“Let go,” he told Jonny, injecting a little imperious frost in his voice. It was a mostly useless attempt, his hand was over the palm Jonny had placed on his belly, clinging to him as surely as Jonny had him wrapped up in his arms.

Jonny hummed as Patrick traced over his knuckles, pressing his fingertips into Patrick’s abs until he tightened them, resisting that press. “Make me,” Jonny replied, with an equal level of command. 

Patrick exhaled, heat traveling through him, making his breath come short. “Fuck,” he told Jonny. “Don’t start something we can’t finish.” 

A door slammed down the hall and Jonny dropped his arms. When Patrick got back to his room, aroused and edgy, he didn’t even jerkoff. He liked the fuel of it simmering through his veins.

Eventually, they got through LA, and finally, finally Boston. He was elated and wrung out, brilliantly triumphant at getting to lift the Conn Smythe, but underneath it all, so goddamn horny. As soon as the pads and jersey masking Jonny’s scent came off in the locker room, even liberally hosed down with champagne as he was, Patrick had gone terrifically, deliriously hard. Frustrated, he barely remembered a time it wasn’t like that. 

When they got back to Chicago, drunk and drained as they were, nothing happened. But Patrick dreamed about it. He dreamed about pinning Jonny down, of sinking his fingers into his short hair and kissing him until it hurt. In that dream he told Jonny he was going to lay him flat and knot him. Jonny smiled that audacious smirk that seized all of the soft bits of Patrick and squeezed, and he said, ‘Yeah? As if you could.’ 

The insistent ringing of Patrick’s cell woke him up. He was hard and irascible, and he’d just been getting to the good part. By the time he finally summoned the brain power to pick up the call rather than accidentally hanging up, he’d realized it was his dad, probably trying to get him to come out so that the family could celebrate with him. Patrick had never wanted to see his family less. Hauling himself out of Jonny’s bed, looking back at the soft, vulnerable expression on Jonny’s face as he slept on his back, he almost told his dad to fuck off and call back another day. 

And then each day that followed conspired somehow to keep them apart or firmly surrounded in a sea of company wherever they went. There were parties and endless team outings and required functions. His friends and family expected to spend time with him, as did Jonny’s. By the fourth day of this, Patrick’s temper was fraying. They were at a yacht party, trapped by obligation, and the itch under Patrick’s skin was so persistent and irritating it was a herculean effort not snarl at everybody who crossed his path. He was relying too heavily on alcohol to get him through it again. They couldn’t continue this way, but when he thought about what it would take to fix it, a part of him was afraid. Sex between them was no small thing. 

He was standing at the prow of the boat, very seriously contemplating jumping into the lake when Jonny sidled up to him, beer in hand. The breeze off the water blew his scent into Patrick’s nose. “Hey,” Patrick said, temporarily soothed by his mere proximity. 

“Hey,” Jonny replied, leaning forward to rest his forearms on the railing. He tilted his head and smiled up at Patrick. 

Patrick shifted slightly closer to him, until Jonny’s sun-warmed shoulder met his side. 

Jonny was quiet, staring out at the water, leaning into Patrick when he said, nonchalantly, “Thinkin’ about you knotting me right here, I don’t even give a fuck who sees.” 

Patrick looked down at Jonny’s profile, open-mouthed. Jonny took an unconcerned swallow of beer, still looking out over the waves. 

“Jonny,” Patrick whispered. He was hot all over, skin too tight. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that Jonny would so easily offer this. When Patrick had first asked him, impetuous, fully expecting a no, it seemed insurmountable. In any arrangement he could envision, allowing yourself to be penetrated was allowing somebody else power over you. That’s what it had meant when betas had taken him into their bodies. He’d been scared to imagine what it would signify for them. Perhaps it would fracture their newly established balance, unavoidable biology asserting itself. And if that happened, it would break Patrick’s heart. He wanted Jonny in every conceivable wrong, fucked-up fashion. He looked at his life stretching before him and he couldn’t imagine not. He laughed now to think of himself praying to make it stop. But he didn’t want Jonny to be any less than himself, chained to Patrick’s will. Patrick had thought, if the time came, he would assume that subjugation upon himself. 

And yet Patrick heard no surrender in Jonny’s admission, the renunciation of Jonny’s essential alphaness. It took Patrick by storm. Why should he? Jonny was not his to command. He was never going to stop battling Patrick and maybe that was all shades of bad, maybe they needed help, but Patrick was never going to want this offer from anybody else. Patrick stared at Jonny, the elegant line of his neck, his capable hand wrapped around his beer bottle, and was amazed that any of this could be real. 

Jonny turned his head to meet Patrick’s eyes. “You wanna find a way to get off this boat?” he asked, the corner of his lips tilting up. 

Patrick had fucked a lot of people in his life. It seemed likes most of them were an exercise in trying to get over Jonny. He hadn’t been this nervous about it since his heritage first presented and he was left fumbling his way to an explanation about his knot, distracted by bare breasts at the same time. Now he was distracted by Jonny’s everything—the way he was sprawled in the bed, unconcernedly naked, the measured cadence of his breaths falling out of rhythm as Patrick kissed him. 

“You’re staring at me,” Jonny said, when Patrick sat back on his heels and just took all of him in, his long solid muscles, the stiff, red protrusion of his knot, cock all thick and stiffened up. Jonny shifted under the weight of his perusal. 

“What,” Patrick started, closing his hand around Jonny’s knot and watching his eyes flutter closed. The skin of Jonny’s cock was velvety soft in his grip, his knot throwing off more heat than the rest of his swollen length. Jonny bit at his lip, hips lifting to push up into his hand. “What if this changes things?”

Jonny paused, turned his cheek into the pillow, expression inscrutable. “Then it changes things.” 

Patrick laughed despite himself. “You make it sound so simple.” 

“It is,” Jonny replied. 

The mechanics of it were not simple, Jonny’s body wasn’t built for this. It hurt him. As Patrick pushed inside, he sounded wounded, pushed beyond endurance. It was hard to watch him fist his fingers in the sheets, straining white-knuckled. Patrick was too big, long and thick, and even wider at the base where his knot was, and he was only an inch inside. He wanted to stop, but he was halfway in now, the pressure and heat around him intense, making it hard to find the right words, something to make Jonny understand it wasn’t worth it. 

Jonny’s chest rose and fell hard. He was so tight, struggling around his girth. Patrick could feel his rim clench and release. Everything was drenched in their combined scent, sex and sweat and the salt of the tears gathering at the corner of Jonny’s eyes. Those tears were the tipping point. 

“I can’t--” he told him, broken. “Jonny, I can’t.” 

“You giving in?” Jonny asked, words coming out between huffing gasps. 

“What?” Patrick replied, involuntarily he sank another inch inside him, his knot pushing insistently at his stretched little hole. 

“You back the fuck off now, and I’m calling this one mine,” Jonny replied, somehow reaching down inside himself and finding that old arrogance. 

“For that, I should pull the fuck out right now and leave you here,” Patrick replied. Jonny couldn’t goad him into fucking him. 

Jonny flexed his hips, taking another inch of his dick. Patrick couldn’t help but look down between them, drinking in the sight of their bodies meeting in—Jonny accommodating his cock. 

“C’mon, give it to me,” Jonny told him, arching into him. There was that last hint of resistance as Patrick kept pressing forward and then his knot popped inside, Jonny’s body swallowing him up. Patrick cut off a harsh cry, trembling now. 

Jonny went tense beneath Patrick. Patrick wasn’t sure what to do with himself, he could barely keep his eyes open the pleasure was so intense, Jonny’s hole fluttering around his knot. 

“Look at you,” Jonny panted, running a hand down his back, “completely falling apart.” 

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he bit out into the skin of Jonny’s shoulder, driving his hips in. Jonny made a noise in the back of his throat, a little rumbling murmur Patrick recognized. “This feel good, Jonny?” 

He pulled out and then stuffed his knot back in. Jonny’s whole body jerked as he did it, mouth dropping open on a soundless moan. “Yeah? That’s working for you?” Patrick asked. When Patrick drew back, slow, slow, slow and then drove forward, putting his back into it, Jonny rolled his hips, raising them to meet his strokes inside. He couldn't believe it, Jonny was taking him so good. He was getting off on this--he liked Patrick's dick. Patrick thrust in hard enough that Jonny’s entire body moved with him, rocking on the bed, pliant beneath him. He leaned forward, bracing himself on his elbows, trying to get his knot in deeper. Every time he did, Jonny clenched down around him. 

Jonny let out a cry, harsh and broken as Patrick nailed him good. “Ah, fuck,” he said, before reaching a hand up over his head to brace himself on the headboard. They were both coming undone fast. Patrick dashed sweat out of his eyes, fighting hard to hang on. Oh god he was so close. Patrick chuckled to himself, ragged, hysterical, almost spent. He wouldn’t feel like a good alpha if he got off first. He'd feel like a goddamn schoolboy disappointment. Jonny deserved better. Jonny deserved the world. Patrick bent his head to kiss him, wrapping his hand around him, palming his knot, thumb pressing just under it. He worked Jonny the way Patrick liked for himself, until Jonny was squirming, cursing, overwhelmed. It pleased Patrick to see him so easy for it, but it pleased him even more when Jonny threw his head back on the pillow and came, sudden and violent. 

The contractions hit and Patrick felt like he’d been punched. He cried out, devastated by the feel of Jonny’s orgasm around his dick. That tight, hot pressure rippling around him, seemingly endless. Patrick thrust in one last time, a quick snap of his hips with enough force that Jonny twisted against him, whether it was into or away from the sensation Patrick couldn’t tell. Patrick’s own orgasm was savage, ripping through him, lighting up the backs of eyelids. It felt momentous. He’d claimed a mate. Only he hadn’t taken Jonny, Jonny had given it to him and Patrick felt whole, unexpurgated for the first time since he realized what exactly he wanted. It took him a long time to come back to himself. 

Jonny lay there, tremors running through him, his arm across his eyes. 

“You okay?” Patrick breathed. 

Jonny took a moment to answer. “Your—your knot is pressing right up—right up against my prostate.” He shifted his hips and moaned. “I can’t even think.” 

Patrick shouldn’t feel alpha-satisfaction over that. He really shouldn’t. But fuck it, he was going to anyway. He’d just be sure to wait a few days before rubbing Jonny’s face in it. When the tie ended and they could separate, mercifully they'd suffered through only twenty minutes of Jonny biting at his lip, staring at the ceiling, tightening down rhythmically around Patrick to the point where he had to tell him to stop it, unless he wanted to start the tie all over again. 

Jonny made a hurt noise as Patrick finally pulled out, gritting his teeth. He rolled over onto his side, gingerly stretching and then groaning in discomfort. He was trembling, obviously exhausted, and Patrick, awash with sudden fear, wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. 

“Get. Over here,” Jonny growled. 

Patrick let out a breath and spooned up behind him, nuzzling Jonny’s shoulder. Jonny sighed. Content though he was to lie here, for as long as Jonny wanted to, Patrick, by contrast, was energized, nerves singing. His brain felt free of static for the first time in days. 

“You gonna be alright?” Patrick asked carefully. 

Jonny’s face was half-hidden by his shoulder, but Patrick could tell from the way his eyes were shining that he was smiling. “Aren’t you gonna try and order me around?” 

“So,” Patrick said, bearing down on him with his will, enough to make a normal person stumble. “Answer me.” 

Jonny barely blinked. Nothing had changed. His will was the same implacable wall, the strongest alpha Patrick had ever met beside himself. They’d be battling until their dying day. Jonny laced their fingers together and brought them up to his mouth to kiss. “Why should I?”

**Author's Note:**

> So, I was unhappy with the ending, so I fixed it...


End file.
